Eating Fish

Netflix has recently issued a documentary outlining how we are exploiting the fish supply. Many who watch it are becoming like vegans and giving up fish altogether. I’m trying to each less meat and more vegetables and fish often seems the right choice. Thus I am encouraged by Guardian and New York Times writer Paul Greenberg who allows for four types.

• Farmed oysters, mussels and clams. - because those that farm them, have to abide by clean water rules

• Alaskan Sockeye salmon. - because preserving their habitat meant that an Alaskan copper mine never happened.

• Peruvian anchoveta - because if you can find it, it isn’t being reduced to pellets, as so many industrial fish are.

• Fish I or a family member catches -n a fresh water lake. I loved fishing from a rowboat accompanied by my father when I was a child. It was a time of calm and companionship - but moreover it was a sustainable kind of fishing. We kept only the perch, bass or trout that met size requirements. We went home or to the cottage, cooked it and ate it. We were mimicking the Georgian Bay patterns of the first nations people who lived there before we settlers came.. To pretend that anything we eat - even vegetables - doesn’t depend on the resources of our planet home is foolishness.